Abstract
This article examines approaches and technologies for setting professional development goals for educators during the post-course period. Clear goal-setting plays a key role in ensuring informed professional development that is self-directed by the educator. The article proposes an innovative solution for setting professional development goals during the post-course period in the form of a mobile, configurable toolkit that enables the design of personalized professional development programs for teachers. As part of the study, a survey of 21,681 teachers was conducted to identify their educational needs and their conscious attitude toward professional development during the post-course period. Sixty-one percent of respondents reported that they did not have a clear idea of how they intended to develop professionally in the near future. For 28% of teachers, the wording of their professional development goals is quite abstract. 10% of teachers defined their post-course professional development goals in terms of outcomes, specifying either a product of their work, a career advancement level, or subject-specific teaching objectives. Only a small proportion of survey participants (1%) cited professional competencies as their goals. The significance of these results lies in their justification of an innovative solution to the challenges of designing a personalized professional development program based on defining its specific, achievable goals in the form of a patentable utility model for a mobile, configurable toolkit. Its applicability as a self-configurable toolkit, made possible by the personalized visual configuration of the kit’s elements, demonstrates its potential for use as new requirements for educators’ qualifications and competencies emerge, along with new resources and forms of professional development.